Spaced repetition turns reading into a physical activity with feedback. If you had an activity that required the knowledge you were hoping to acquire, you would learn at the same rate or faster by practice. Most lessons are encoded really poorly. I think spaced repetition is great, but practice at something is better.<p>A hacker is just someone who has practiced learning independently and has become exceptionally good at it. The reason people say you can't teach the hacker mindset is because without the underlying drive, there's nothing you can tell anyone. It's like when teachers who lament students don't care what they say so long as they get the right grade, it's because those students are optimizing for approval in a system because that's sufficent for their limited purposes. The more you profess to them, the more you reinforce that learning is passive submission to authority. If you want to make hackers, start with necessity, and technique will emerge as the artifact of navigating constraints. If you want to make people smart, challenge them instead of just telling them things. Hackers aren't defined by knowing more, they're defined by having physically done more. Spaced repetition as it's usually presented optimizes for outcomes in an approval environment that produces people who have been rewarded for cheating themselves out of knowledge and expereince.<p>I would say, want to learn physics? Build mechanisms or make radios. Number theory? Break cryptosystems. Astronomy and geometry? Sail at night. Lead? Ride horses. Fluid dynamics? Tune engines. Statistics? Write a spam filter. Speak a language? Tell their jokes, etc. Imo, most education is set around meaningless but scalable exercises of professed skills instead of meaningful exercises that are more powerful, but don't scale. We've optimized for scale at the expense of quality. It's the solution to an inferior problem.<p>So sure, learn spaced repetition, but really, find something and practice it for more joy and better results instead.
I think a better title might be “Memorize Exponentially” because that seems to be the true gist of the article.<p>There are undoubtedly many areas in which memorization is useful. I tend to use memorization as a second-order tool, in the sense that it is only useful to memorize once I’ve learned that memorization would be necessary.<p>I memorize combinations to locks I unlock frequently. I memorize names of items I sell in my shop so I don’t have to look them up over and over again.<p>In school I often memorized equations just long enough to get by. The few that are still with me are not those I used most frequently; they are the equations I understood at a visceral level. Obviously this means I am more conversant in Newtonian happenings than quantum concerns, so maybe there is a place for memorization. Or perhaps I lack sufficient experience in the quantum to really feel the laws that govern the smallest realms.<p>Either way the article paints a dull picture of learning. What of the feeling in the minds and hands of those future carpenters swinging their first hammer blows? What of the deep learning of the pianist that happens only after the transition from the first concerto as audience to the latest as featured virtuoso?<p>An exponential increase in the type of “learning” furthered by spaced repetition might be useful to some. I still prefer the linear road to understanding.
Anyone else feel like they just read a bunch of assumptions with no support followed by a chart "proving" an exponential equation grows faster than a linear one?<p>What the heck am I supposed to take away from this?<p>This is a half ass theory, not evidence.<p>Where's a shred of evidence, on the time scales here, these "units of information" are retained (under either method). Are they even relevant compared to a _skill_ like reading that enables quicker information ingestion across an entire life o and is applicable across a wider range of problems than _individual information units you read_??
There are a few e-ink note taking devices. They pride themselves on feeling like paper, but they're far more expensive than a notebook and offer trade-offs rather than clear advantages.<p>For example, is using a text search on an e-ink device better than knowing "I wrote this down in the first 1/3rd of the notebook on the page with a coffee stain". Maybe? Maybe not. It's a trade-off. A physical notebook and an e-notebook both offer different ways of indexing, searching, and remembering where things are. One is not clearly superior to the other in this respect.<p>These e-ink devices have left a clear advantage they could claim unrealized.<p>I want an e-ink notepad where I can turn my notes into spaced repetition. I want to take hand written notes, proven to improve memory, and then I want to blot out portions of the page and have those blotted out portions be presented to me by a spaced repetition algorithm to help me remember my own hand written notes.<p>I'd pay a lot for such a dedicated device. Getting hand written notes and images into Anki or other spaced repetition programs sucks. I'd love to just be able to write or draw, with my own hand, and easily integrate with a spaced repetition algorithm. This is valuable enough that I'd happily use a dedicated device just for this purpose.
Title is misleading. This isn't learning exponentially. Anybody who has used a spaced repetition app (like Anki) knows that you generally learn around the same number of words every day. You're not going to be learning 10 words in a day and then one week later, learn 1000 words in a day.<p>This article talks about how the reps needed to learn <i>one</i> piece of information, reduces exponentially over time. You might need 1 rep per day at the beginning, but only 1 rep per 100 days after a month. This basically means that if you have a lifespan of 100 years, spaced repetition means you only need around 10-20 reps to remember each piece of knowledge for the rest of your life.<p>But learning N items will still take 10*N reps. It scales linearly. A far cry from exponential
My idea is that there is a market for community-curated spaced repetition decks. Many people want to learn the same things such as a foreign language or a programming language.<p>The difficult part is creating a deck and crafting the answers and questions. Because usually this is a time-consuming process. So if it was a community-effort then it would be a win-win.<p>This is probably not an original idea and if anyone knows already where to find such decks, that would be cool.
Memorization and repetition are not learning or knowledge, these are just important tools for learning. I believe that learning is a sort of compression algorithm. You pass some data through your brain and you try to compress it down to an exponentially smaller subset, from which you should be able to recreate the rest. The way you compress, the selection process and the quality of data, that's learning. The way you decompress, that's knowledge.
This is a neat argument for spaced repetition, which I think is a great idea and generally works very well. That said, though, I don't think it's a good idea to conflate knowledge with intelligence in this context; knowledge is concrete and measurable, while intelligence is, at best, nebulous and difficult to measure.<p>Knowing things is really important, but I don't think learning makes you "smart"; it just makes you know more things.
Gwern had also written a long essay describing the same[1].<p>[1]<a href="https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition" rel="nofollow">https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition</a>
I apologize in advance to the author but this is pretty dumb. Learning is not remembering all the words in a dictionary or all entries in an encyclopedia. You learn exponentially by layering concepts and ideas, one more complex than the previous one, on top of each other. You advance by understanding more deeply what you read and actually think for yourself. Wise men recommend to learn for 1/3 of the time, think for 1/3 and apply your knowledge to the real world for 1/3. You advance by learning from more advanced masters and more advanced books on the same topic.
I don't see how "reading" is anyone anyone on HN needs advice to do, all people do nowadays is reading if reading is defined as getting information from text on a screen. Using a computer is basically entirely reading.<p>Edit: to the article's point spaced repetition to memorize domain specific facts is useful but it's not exponential like reading is.
I sometime use a process of capturing stray thoughts, which I do on paper. I’ve considered making an app for it and I had considered showing things back to myself at random intervals. I wonder if I could use this idea to capture things I’ve learned and repeat them back to me at the intervals presented here. It would probably be easy to do and might be an interesting test to see if the schedule benefits me remembering things I learn.<p>I even created a little web page for the app, but I’ve mostly abandoned the idea due to a lack of interest.<p><a href="https://stray.joeldare.com" rel="nofollow">https://stray.joeldare.com</a>
We wrote this at Save All (<a href="https://saveall.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://saveall.ai/</a>) and want to know what you think - tell us why it's wrong / right
This article is about memorizing more effectively not learning.<p>To learn, you need to act and have the world give you feedback.<p>If you’re starting a company, you need to create something and get feedback on its value and iterate.
The application of learned concepts is what separates the brilliant from the average. If the application is simply dumping your learned concepts onto paper for the purpose of a test, and then forgetting it all three weeks later then you have missed the point of learning. If you apply learned concepts in the real world and also apply the best ideas throughout your life, you have succeeded in ways many people don't succeed.
I’ve paid for Anki on iOS and have gone as far as exporting flashcards from Emacs/org-mode which I keep in version control. I normally use it for specific information like runtimes of algorithms for interviews, rule of thumb numbers for doing estimations, etc. I also can imagine how medicine students use flashcards for remembering dozens of muscle or bone names.<p>However, I’d be very interested in learning how people use SRS for remembering information they read on books/articles. Do you state new concepts as Q/A? Do you save interesting facts, or things you think might be useful in the future?<p>I think this second type of information is not well suited for flashcards. The article seems to imply it is, though, and I’d love to be wrong about it.
Another method I have used in the past is to rewatch content I used to learn a subject at 3-4x speed. A lot of high quality content that spans multiple days can be viewed in only a few hours this way. The key I’ve learned with this is to do this across variations of the content you wish to learn and re-learn. Combine this with audio books at similar speeds and you can really get through content very quickly.<p>When using this method if you are learning something for the first time or you come across something that peaks your interest, an exercise or question, pause and take notes, implement the solution in multiple variations, then continue the video/audio.
For something allegedly this important, the author could have invested more time into elaborating, providing more examples, etc. I'm still skeptical, this is just another rando Medium rant as far as I'm concerned.
I'm confused, when they say a reminder, what do they mean? Also, when they used books as an example, do they mean read the same thing 2 days later?<p>It would be great if someone could provide an example to an old dummy like me.
Hey, your username reminds me of the statistical measure called <i>p-value</i>. I hope Save All will help people beat the odds and cast off the shackles of the power law as it's applied to the act of learning.
Summary of article:<p>The effectiveness of spaced repetition scales exponentially and much faster than other learning methods. So use spaced repetition and you’ll learn a lot faster in the long-run.
Even just the idea of incremental improvements needs spreading more. For some reason I needed to hear it and it was not intuitive to me. (Maybe because I was a quick learner and always picked up stuff fast.)<p>Get started, practice often, that's the only way to have compounding gains at many activities. Music, hobbies, working with your hands, etc.<p>The long perspective is very helpful. Don't worry about improving today, but about the long trajectory.
its not just note taking + spaced repetition - you can also change your slope greatly by learning in public and learning with peers.<p>ive done a lot of thinking on this area and have mocked up a "Big L" notation for learning curves - shameless plug: <a href="https://www.swyx.io/big-l-notation" rel="nofollow">https://www.swyx.io/big-l-notation</a>
I really like the idea of exponential learning, and was disappointed to see that this is just an ad for spaced repetition.<p>My opinion is that true exponential learning depends on specific content in a specific order.<p>What we need is the dependency tree of concepts. Does such a thing exist? Curriculums are kind of a non-rigorous attempt at this.
I'm glad this post looks at how we can get better at learning — it's an interesting area, and I think that meta "how does my brain work" is important to understand as part of the process.<p>I did want to give some feedback, though. I think this post suffers from too much hand-waving, which is what plagues most other posts about learning and spaced repetition (excluding probably just Gwern). For example, it compares flash cards and reading to just reading, citing the results of the study as a negative:<p>> <i>This is however a very slow process. One study implies that in the best case it takes adults 10 years of reading 1 hour a day to get twice as effective at reading. Even if this is technically learning exponentially, the improvement rate is so slow that the process is indistinguishable from a linear one.</i><p>...<p>> <i>We said in the best case it takes adults 10 years to get twice as effective reading. With spaced repetition it takes only days for your time to get twice as effective. These growth rates are completely different.</i><p>Maybe the rate of change of effectiveness of the reading is slow, but does that matter if you're accumulating knowledge from all of that reading, especially as it builds off of prior knowledge? I also don't think it's a 1:1 comparison to contrast these. It only takes days to get twice as effective at reading with spaced repetition? Or at learning? If it's the latter, I don't think that's what the earlier study measured?<p>The other thing that jumped out at me is the huge focus on spaced repetition and memory for learning, which are absolutely helpful, but there seems to be a lack of what constitutes memorizing versus understanding (and I'm not sure I see that in the <i>Learning is Remembering</i> post either). I think about other ways to build your understanding, like working through problems and applying the knowledge, that are key to learning. Much of learning physics is getting your hands dirty in the equations, and there's a big difference between knowing a formula and really understanding it in action.
Is anyone aware of a commercialized app that enables team learning through spaced reputation? Say for a support team learning a new process or skill where the learning can be heavily curated?<p>Thanks in advance.
IF<p>Learn slow and you won’t reach your potential. Learn fast and you might. Learn exponentially and you’ll achieve more than anyone thought you could.<p>THEN<p>...<p>Else, we don't know.